Love Claims to Fame? Readers share 100 books like Claims to Fame...

This is a nice primary source assessment of the vast shadow created by Gleick and Bod’s books. Read simultaneously as both an artifact of the times as well as serious scholarly material, Boorstin deftly outlines the evolution of thinking and communication against the rising onslaught of electronic media flooding the world of the 1960s and beyond: the image and performative illusion of “pseudo-events” dominating our attention.

Read as prophecy, I also pair with Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) and Paul Valéry’s The Conquest of Ubiquity essay from the 1920s.

This book has changed my personal and professional life. It has made me aware of how essential social interaction and civic engagement are to the health of communities and nations. It made me want to become more involved in organizations, get to know my neighbors and integrate social capital into just about everything I write and every course I teach.

It is loaded with information, charts, and graphs and can be a slog to read cover to cover. However, it is also essential to understand what is happening today.

When I decided to write about celebrity, I knew from the beginning that I would depend on Richard Schickel’s His Picture in the Papers.
Schickel was the former movie reviewer for both LIFE and TIME magazines, and I used simply enjoy his perceptive insights when I also worked at TIME.
Schickel uses the case study of the charismatic Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. to show how his celebrity was generated by his image reproduced in movies, magazines, and newspapers.

Schickel later wrote Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America, which further discussed how celebrity images have replaced the value of ideas in American culture.

Neal Gabler is one of our most astute cultural critics.

I met him when I invited him to be my guest in a Princeton seminar called “Writing about Popular Culture.”

He talked compellingly about his books like Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity and An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, which carefully examined the inner workings of entertainment and celebrity. 

In Life: The Movie, Gabler takes the argument even further, drawing on examples ranging from Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Cruise to Princess Diana and Oprah Winfrey to show how celebrity hagiography has turned everything from news to religion and politics into an inescapable public entertainment. 

You’re probably picking up a theme here - I love an underdog, books that go largely unnoticed. Ron Rosenbaum spent most of his career writing for The Village Voice, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and many others. The Secret Parts of Fortune is a collection of some of his best stuff. Someone described Rosenbaum as “one part intellectual and one part private eye,” and these essays will definitely lead you down a rabbit hole, taking you places you’ve never even considered to venture. My point of entry was A Killing in Camelot, about the unsolved murder of Mary Meyer, an artist and Washington socialite who turned up murdered on a D.C. canal towpath in 1964. As the title suggests, there is a Kennedy connection – isn’t there always.

I originally read this book in my late teens, but I never forgot how much it taught me not just about flappers, but how history can leap off the page. I even cited this book as an influence in my book proposal for Glitter and Concrete.

Flappers were such a vibrant group of women, and Zeitz does them justice bringing them to life. I wanted the drag artists in my book to do the same. 

Family can be an emotionally charged word, especially for people who come from toxic families or don’t even know their biological families. This is why I appreciate this non-fiction book by Bella DePaulo, which acknowledges that there is more than one way to be a family. She goes well beyond the typical nuclear family of mother, father, and biological children to explore how people are living together in the 21st century. One type of configuration she explores, the multi-generational household, is near and dear to my heart because I grew up like that, and it changed my life for the better.

Malcom Gladwell is undoubtedly the best translator of social science research writing these days. 

What the Dog Saw is a compendium of New Yorker essays penned by Gladwell, several of which have a direct link to managing people. Two of my favorites are “Late Bloomers” – an essay on the fallacy of inherent talent, and “Most Likely to Succeed”.

These essays say a lot about employee selection and development, challenging the assumptions held by too many managers that good staff are born, not made, and that selecting top talent is the key to competitive advantage. Gladwell goes with the evidence, but does so in a super-engaging manner. 

Where the Girls Are is about a particular generation of women growing up in post War America, and the impact popular media had on their lives, both for good and for bad. It weaves wonderfully smart, often funny, always engagingly written discussions of pop music, movies, and television shows with Douglas’s own experiences at the time. It’s unabashedly feminist—but it isn’t a speech or a political manifesto. It’s an exploration of the push-pull of growing up female at a transitional time, a time in which attitudes toward women were changing, unevenly, and how pop culture reflected the tensions of the times. This book is history, memoir, sociology, media studies, all at once – immensely informative and very entertaining.

I grew up at the best moment to fall in love with Britpop—Pulp is the best of them, by the way. But I digress. As an American, I knew little about the culture that birthed Britpop; I just consumed it without context. Daniel Rachel’s oral history on Cool Brittania explains this entire culture where a bunch of ’90s British rock bands were influenced by ’60s British rock bands.

This cultural blip was also tied to soccer, Trainspotting, the work of Nick Hornby, and “lad culture.” Oh, and I even learned what lad culture was! It was a straightforward read but packed with a ton of info that helped me appreciate British pop culture even more than I already (superficially) did.